About that birth control ruling…

I have been getting a lot of questions and comments in the last 24 hours, and a lot of it is in the vein of “well you lost, now what?” And I have been very quiet, for me, about it until I could come up with a direct answer that encompassed exactly what I wanted to say. This is going to be a long one, so put on your seat belts. In the latest SCOTUS ruling it has become evident that we need to KEEP FIGHTING as long as it takes. We are lucky in some ways that this is an election year. Let me take a moment to remind women what that means. My grandparents mothers didn’t vote. They did not have the right to. In a very narrow decision they earned that right through the work of the suffragists who with hunger strikes and campaigning managed to convince the men in charge that women are of equal value to society and deserved a voice. We have an opportunity to use that voice this year. Our grandmothers and mothers fought hard for our right to be able to have control over our own bodies. Their generation saw great strides in the advancement of health care for women. Women no longer had to die for pregnancies that didn’t go as planned, suffer at the hands of back alley doctors out of sheer desperation, or have sex be used as a method of control dismissed largely by society as acceptable. Women could choose when to start a family. Women gained more legal leverage against rape, incest, and domestic violence. There was a level of fear that was starting to be stripped away. They still had many layers to go, but it was a starting place. They began to enter the work force and seek higher education in much larger numbers. They gained ground there with FMLA and anti discrimination laws. And then began a generation of people that through selective history lessons have taken these rights, laws, hard won battles for granted. They didn’t notice the slight, or if they did they didn’t care much because everything was “mostly” even and nothing was really being threatened. They focused on other things. Now we have found ourselves not only needing to expand and blaze new trails for our future generation of women, but we have to regain ground that we had already secured. While we were sleeping special interest disguised as religion and protecting the family has snuck into our government, workplace, and bedrooms. Its actually so brilliant that it has convinced women to voluntary give up a lot of their rights. I will give them credit where it is due, but after all money can buy the best in the business of politics. So where do we go from here? I look at my daughter and think about what I want for her. I think about my sons and what I want for them. It isn’t very different. I don’t want my children to be victims of circumstance. I want my daughter to have the choice to decide who and when she will marry, and if she will at all. I want her to decide when she will have children and have access to what she needs to achieve that goal. I want the same for my boys. I want my children to walk through this life, free from shame inflicted upon them by other people. I want my children to know the value of hard work, and also that their paychecks will be the same regardless of their gender. I want them to be able to see a doctor when they need to, and not be enslaved by medical bills. I want them to have equal healthcare available to them. I want my daughter to be able to leave the house safely without feeling like she has to be in a group or dressed a certain way to be deserving of basic respect as a human being. I want my sons to be able to have emotions without being told not to and to be treated as more than sex crazed animals without any capacity for self control. I want my daughter to not have to make excuses for everything while my sons are excused by society. I want this for all of our sons and daughters. So until these things happen, I’m not going to stop. I will not shut up. I am not going to back down, and in the words of Harvey Milk, “LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!”